Generous Diner Leaves $3,000 Tip to Help Evicted Waitress Pay Rent

How good of a tipper are you—18 percent? 20 percent? How about 7,000 percent? That’s the size of a tip left by a New York City restaurant patron last week.

A man identified only as “Mike from New York City” (no relation to yours truly) left a $3,000 tip on a $43.50 bill. “This woman had been serving us for almost a year now,” said Mike, who asked to remain anonymous in speaking with ABC News. “She’s a lovely individual, and she talked about how she was served an eviction notice last month.” Realizing that Manhattan rents aren’t cheap, this bigtime tipper decided that $3,000 was a relatively logical amount.

The beneficiary of his generosity and the Times Square restaurant in which it all went down have also remained unidentified. So why speak to the press at all? Well, Mike says he was inspired to do his good deed as part of a pay-it-forward campaign created by his eighth-grade science teacher. The “ReesSpecht Life” campaign was started by Rich Specht to honor his 22-month-old son, who passed away in a drowning accident in 2012. Specht’s organization's primary goal is to encourage people to perform acts of kindness and inspire others to do the same by handing out free pay-it-forward cards.

After hearing about Mike’s gesture, Specht told Pix11,“This young man used to come up to my room to talk with me, and I remember many of our conversations that we had over the course of that year…to think that someone I had a decade ago would honor my little boy or even remember his eighth-grade science teacher in such a way blows me away.”

Though Specht also wouldn’t identify his old student, he did shed a little light on his background, saying that Mike is a rising Broadway star. But even if you aren’t making that big acting money, Specht said everyone involved “wanted it to be about the act of kindness.” If you’re so inspired, you can feel free to pay it forward in any denomination you feel is appropriate.